Ghanaian startup, Dext Technology is among 3 innovative start-ups selected to represent Africa in this year’s ISHOW, a global competition for hardware-led social innovations.

The competition, organized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) is scheduled to take place in the USA from the 18th to the 20th of October 2017. The ASME focuses on enhancing social innovation, that is, solving social and environmental issues through enterprise. The society aims at supporting the design and engineering of product ideas and ensuring that they become market realities. Dext became part of the competition after going through the first event held in Kenya in May this year.

The competition and event will feature start-ups from various countries, and Ghana’s team Dext – made up of Charles Ofori Antipem and Micheal Asante-Afrifa (designers of the Science Set and co-founders of Dext). The team is hoping to get the best out of this year’s competition and place Ghana on the global landscape of innovative science and technology. Beyond that, the team hopes to get valuable insight, advice, mentoring to enable Dext scale globally.

The Dext Team

The team’s innovative product the “Science Set” is a user-friendly and affordable miniaturized science laboratory. Designed and locally manufactured in Ghana, the Science Set is set to revolutionize the way science is studied at the basic school level.

DEXT science set

In November 2016, DEXT received the GHIE award for “Engineering Concept and Innovation” from the Ghana Engineers Association in recognition of its potential contribution to education, human resource development and national economic development.

Currently, over 2000 Science sets have been sold and Dext is in partnership with various non-governmental organisations such as Exploratory, and schools such as KNUST Basic School to incorporate the Science Set into their science education programmes.

It is the vision of the DEXT team to reach over a million students by the end of 2020 and the ISHOW is set to help shape and build Dext’s capacity to reach markets whiles remaining socially relevant.